1) Metropolis
2) Horrors of a worker’s life. He feels as though he is being crucified to the clock, sign of being overworked and being treated like a slave.

Vaishnavi

METROPOLIS
concept could be 10 hour work week? Reminds me of A clock work orange

varuns88

4

2

2

1.Metropolis
2.Decimal Clock…NOT!

Aparna

1

1. Metropolis
2. On May 8 1790, the French National Assembly decided to introduce the metric system – and the 10-day week.A year still had 12 months, but now they were divided into three 10-day weeks.Each day was divided into 10 hours, each hour into 100 decimal minutes and each decimal minute had 100 decimal seconds.

1. Metropolis
2. From Yahoo Answers: An essay.
The main theory would be that the workers’ lives are governed by this clock: 10 hours off for part of the workers while the others are on, then vice-versa. Since they live deep underground, they don’t need to go by the actual 24-hour day of the earth, and are therefore submitted by the rulers to a 20-hour day – 10 on, 10 off.

This suggests that power is control over the time of one’s subordinates.

This film is strewn with references to the Old and New Testaments. A preacher speaks of the Tower of Babel. Freder is stalked, in his nightmares, by representations of the Seven Deadly Sins. Characters – the heroine named Maria, or the employee named Josephat – are constantly invoked by names from the Old Texts. There is, during the climactic portions, a flood of Biblical proportions. And when a machine malfunctions and claims the lives of the workers manning it, this visual is superimposed with that of Moloch, the God who demanded sacrifices. (The dead men troop into Moloch’s open mouth, as if paralleling their actions of a minute ago, when they surrendered their lives to the malfunctioning machine.) But the most explicit instance of religious subtext is this visual of Freder slumped at the elevator machine, its hands resting on his outstretched arms. Freder, finally, has begun to bear the cross.

No optical printing system existed at the time, so to create a matte effect, a large mirror was placed at an angle to reflect a piece of artwork while live footage was projected onto the reverse. To expose the projected footage, the silvering on the back of the mirror had to be scraped off in strategically appropriate places. One mistake would ruin the whole mirror. This was done for each separate shot that had to be composited in this manner. This procedure was developed by Eugen Schüfftan and is known as the “Schufftan Process.

Metropolis
After a grueling ten-hour shift that stretches mercilessly, Freder collapses at the foot of the horrific clock-like machine, arms outstretched — symbolically crucified to the machine that has enslaved the workers. Freder’s cries of “Father, I never knew ten hours could be so long!” mirror Christ’s own agonized “Father, Father, why have you forsaken me?”

The concept is that of “Semiotic square” which is a way of classifying concepts which are relevant to a given opposition of concept. The movie is divided into various spaces making possible various transfers and disjunctions etc etc for more info read the paper by Alan Williams Here